Ordinarily in most jurisdictions your license is a General Practitioner’s license, specialization comes from having worked in a Law Firm or in an organisation which primarily deals with that area of law. Most lawyers will be familiar with the basics of most areas, but while a Shipping Lawyer will know the basics of criminal law and might if pushed be able to argue a straightforward bail application, he is not the guy you want for a murder trial.
Beware these sorts of statistics. There are lawyers about who claim never to have lost a case, or some such. Leaving aside for the moment the prospect of straight out lying in making this claim, it is necessary to be aware of the statistical manipulation that is behind it.
Lawyers (barristers at least) in Commonwealth countries follow the cab rank rule. You don’t get to pick your clients. If there are jurisdictions where lawyers can pick and chose their clients on the basis of perceived innocence then a lawyer can claim never to lose a case merely be setting his filter very high. In the environment of the cab rank rule, lawyers don’t count as losses the cases where clients plead guilty. So to have a record of no losses at trial only means you have a record of being too willing to advise a client to plead guilty, leaving only the easy wins to take to trial. The very best lawyers have all lost cases, some against the run of play. Trial lawyering requires making instant decisions that might turn out disastrously with no crystal ball. As was said upthread, most cases are won on the evidence. The best a lawyer can claim is that he wins almost all the cases he should win, and sometimes wins some against the run of play.
But being a good lawyer is not really capable of being measured in statistics. What makes a good trial lawyer is a combination of intellectual acuity and learning, charm, maturity of judgment, technical skill at cross-examination and addressing juries and judges and Sheldonesque doggedness. Self praise is no recommendation. Guarantees of success, or claims never to have lost a case, etc, are red flags.
There are also horses for courses. The guy you want to defend you on a commercial fraud charge may not be the guy you want to cross-examine a little girl in a sex complaint.
How does a lay person find a good lawyer? Damfino. There’s plenty of extreme duds who still seem to attract clients and make a living. Same is true for doctors, too. Lawyers who are in the loop know among themselves who the class acts are, but I don’t know how you get access to that information.
I believe that my observation is valid.
OJ Simpson got off because he had an army of lawyers who succeeded in turning his murder case into a case against the LAPD.
Had he gone with Lawyer X, he wold have been convicted.
Maybe he would have been convicted. However he won because the prosecution dropped the ball, the evidence that they relied on turned out to be less reliable then previously thought, the defense was able to poke holes in and explain away the prosecution case. Having competent and indeed brilliant lawyer did not hurt him at all, but if the evidence against him had been stronger, even they would not have been able to help.
If (as in a case I did) you are accused of burglary of a store and are caught on CCTV doing the deed, threatening the clerk, taking things and putting them in your bag and the same items are latter recovered from your possession, your fingerprints are all over the racks you took the items from and eyewitness identify you, you are screwed and there is precisely nothing anyone can do.Most cases however present you with at least some chance to impeach the evidence against you.
I think this illustrates a point a lot of nonlawyers don’t understand – it’s not just how much the lawyer charges, it’s how many resources you can throw at the case. I very much doubt that the OJ case was the first time the LAPD screwed up, but OJ was able to pay people to track down and discover all of the above long before his brilliant attorneys used that information to create reasonable doubt. Similar story with the Duke lacrosse players – the $1MM plus they spent on defense didn’t just pay for the rock-star awesomeness of their attorneys, it paid for an enormous number of man-hours in gathering all of of the evidence, learning the science behind it all, studying everything, and identifying and exploiting the serious flaws in the prosecution’s case. A lawyer being paid a $5000 flat fee simply cannot do that, no matter how good s/he is.
Certainly, at least in the US. Most people assume that law school offers specializations, which really isn’t true. Everyone who goes to a US law school graduates with the same degree*.
While the various codes of professional conduct caution lawyers against taking cases they are not equipped to handle, strictly speaking any lawyer should be able to handle any case.
Trial practice is simply a matter of identifying the issue(s) and the relevant case law, a process which changes very little between fields. Experienced lawyers may know the relevant statutes, rules and case law already, but in theory that just means they work quicker.
After all, every lawyer has to start somewhere, and there are lots (though fewer today) who go straight out and hang up a shingle and start plying their trade.
Doesn’t work the same way in the US. Lawyers are absolutely free to pick their cases, at least in solo practice. Even outside solo practice, managing partners or whoever selects cases is going to apply largely the same principles in selecting cases their firm takes on.
Even those who can’t pick and choose their cases can still massage their numbers by taking plea deals or settlements in cases they know they’re going to lose. For example, I know a drug crimes prosecutor who was won at trial 99 times out of 99, because he’s never taken a case to trial where the outcome was in any real doubt.
*Some US law schools offer LLMs, which are additional specialized degrees, but as far as I know the only practice area where LLMs are useful is tax law. Otherwise, LLM candidates are mostly foreign trained lawyers trying to qualify for US bar membership, or people who want to teach.
All that being said, you might be subject to disciplinary action from the bar if you take a case you know you aren’t equipped to handle and bollix it (say, a first time criminal defense attorney taking on a capital case).
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Certainly, at least in the US. Most people assume that law school offers specializations, which really isn’t true. Everyone who goes to a US law school graduates with the same degree*.
While the various codes of professional conduct caution lawyers against taking cases they are not equipped to handle, strictly speaking any lawyer should be able to handle any case.
Trial practice is simply a matter of identifying the issue(s) and the relevant case law, a process which changes very little between fields. Experienced lawyers may know the relevant statutes, rules and case law already, but in theory that just means they work quicker.
After all, every lawyer has to start somewhere, and there are lots (though fewer today) who go straight out and hang up a shingle and start plying their trade.
Doesn’t work the same way in the US. Lawyers are absolutely free to pick their cases, at least in solo practice. Even outside solo practice, managing partners or whoever selects cases is going to apply largely the same principles in selecting cases their firm takes on.
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True, but most young lawyers don’t get cases like Capital Trials, or Supreme Court briefs, notwithstanding what you might feel in law school.:D;) Most young Lawyers do fairly straightforward work in the first few months and even years of their practice and are usually either under a formal scheme of supervision (as in most Commonwealth Countries) or informally by their firm (as in the US). No one is going to offer major complicated cases to a freshly minted lawyer outside of wholly exceptional circumstances and that mitigates against truly out of depth Counsel.
Furthermore, even in common wealth countries, Barristers and Advocate are usually able to avoid unwanted briefs, the desirability of instructing someone who does not want to be instructed is very less.
The point is that that the solo practice element of US law means that young lawyers do get major cases on occasion. Jose Baez had been a member of the bar for nearly 15 years, but he was suspended for some of that time and had almost no trial experience before the Casey Anthony trial.
I’ve worked with Attorneys for 30 years.
The best attorneys aren’t having big web pages
The best attorneys aren’t buying out the back page of the yellow pages
The best attorneys don’t make tv or radio ad’s
What makes a good attorney?
Well you have to ask yourself first what are you looking for in an attorney.
There are 2 types of Attorneys.
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Deal makers- These attorneys know a lot of people in the prosecutors office, US Attorney’s office, and the police department. Their job is that you are caught dead to rights and they get your the best possible deal. Many times they are not good trial attorneys, but great at getting a deal done at a sports game, golf course, lunch, etc.
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Trial attorneys, A good trial attorney would be able to make deals based on his track record of taking you (the other side) to court and you having a very high probability of being the loser, they can broker deals based on not wanting to go to the head prosecutor saying Bill beat me again. A good attorney is a scholar of laws and has litigated in courts in Bench and Jury trials, and knows how to talk to people.
A good attorney has an excellent support staff of investigators, paralegals, and co-counsel who take their vision and make it so.
Good attorneys are the ones with the single line ad in the phone book. They don’t need the ad because they make so much money on all their wins that they can’t handle the extra business anyway. In fact many really good trial attorneys bring in others to handle their overflow.
Oh and don’t go by a superlawyer or who’s who, anyone can get into those.
To watch a good attorney work is as good as watching Baryshnikov or Domingo.